


The Cloud Mirror

by Miss_M



Category: Where the Sky is Silver and the Earth is Brass - Sonya Taaffe
Genre: Antisemitism, Canon Jewish Character, Forests, Gen, Holocaust, Mentions of Death, Period Typical Attitudes, Pre-Canon, Resistance, Tide of History Challenge, Winter, World War II, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:47:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27727676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: The first time she saw a demon, Chaye had been on the lookout for the whole world trying to kill her.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 14
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The Cloud Mirror

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reconditarmonia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/gifts).



> I own nothing.

The first time she saw a demon, Chaye had been on the lookout for the whole world trying to kill her.

In the forest, the calendar – like so many elements of civilization – lost meaning, writing left out in the rain. An early-winter day, the sun a red smear at noon, gone long before sundown, behind heavy clouds. The forest had turned skeletal over mere days, the pines grey and green like Soviet uniforms between the bare branches of the oaks, the alders, the birches. Chaye had come to hate the sight of a birch copse, especially once all the leaves dropped, the slender white trunks with the black spots reminded her too much of people huddled together, shivering, in the market square. Pale, naked, bruised, their ribs sticking out.

As winter bit into autumn, the beauty of the leaves’ burning colors was lost on the forest dwellers trying to assess how long the snows might last, whether the people on that one isolated farm could be trusted to take in Ada before her baby was born into the stone-hush of the woods, how likely the peasants were to keep bartering with the forest dwellers for food, whether the Germans – always bored in winter, with little hunting to be had and all the little ghettos for miles around cleared months ago – would round up the peasants in one of their punitive sweeps, reprisals for someone having shot a lone soldier riding his bicycle on the road between two villages and looted his corpse.

Chaye’s new boots were too big for her, and she didn’t have any straw or old newspapers to stuff inside. She’d traded her spare woolen socks and three bullets for a pair of leather gloves lined with rabbit fur, soft as her little brother’s hair, so she filled up the boots with fallen leaves for now, when she could gather enough dry leaves. Red, yellow, brown, orange, they spilled from her tall, black, leather boots when she took them off before sleep. The leaves rustled too much when she walked, she’d need to find another solution, while the forest seemed to contract in on itself in the gathering cold, crouch and prepare to wait out another winter. 

Chaye might have wondered if she herself could wait out another winter if the passage of time had meant much to her still. She had been sick for several days, fever keeping her up at night and making her sleep in the short, grey day. This was her first patrol since before the fever.

She stopped at the pond by the great oak tree where peasant girls left wreaths of wildflowers, dolls made out of corn silk, and tiny glazed pots of honey-wine in summer, offerings to the forest to send them a bridegroom as tall as the oak, as strong as the earth. The pond was really a large puddle, fed by autumn rains and already ice-rimmed, and only a few broken shards of homemade pottery remained among the oak’s roots from last summer. 

Chaye pulled off her right glove and plunged her hand into the water past her wrist, catching her breath at the cold, liquid grip. She washed her face, her cheeks and her brow felt ember-hot. She’d get the sleepless shakes again that night. She waited till the surface of the pond had stilled, tried to make out her face in the low light of late afternoon. Her hair, roughly chopped with a knife after she’d got lice that summer, shadowed her features, her eyes glowed back at her from the grey and pewter and inky black of her reflection. The sky, thick with snow-bearing clouds, seemed to rearrange itself behind and above her, the clouds turned briefly jagged and sharp like grey glass cracking into splinters all around Chaye. She blinked and felt her brow with her dripping hand, her fingers already turning red.

Something moved over by the oak tree. There was no crack of twigs, no rustle of fallen leaves beneath someone’s boots, no click of a rifle, but Chaye knew she was being watched as well as any animal of the forest. 

Swinging her rifle down from her shoulder – she hadn’t put it down, not even to wash her face, she’d been in the forest a long time – she raised it and chambered a cartridge while rising and turning to aim at the oak. Someone stood by the tree watching her, as though they’d sprouted from among the roots where girls hoping for a husband left their summer offerings, someone tall and angular whose face she couldn’t make out, wearing a greatcoat or perhaps shrouded in great wings made of black feathers, pinions as long as Chaye’s hand. 

Chaye fired. 

The crack of the shot shattered the forest into a million pieces. Chaye saw the oak’s bark splinter, but no one stood beside the great tree. 

A tense few moments descended, like the silence following a slap to the face. Chaye’s breath whistled between her teeth, then someone hidden among the trees beyond the oak rustled the undergrowth deliberately, stomped on a fallen branch, and a low, carrying voice reached Chaye like a worded breeze:

“What the fuck are you doing? Don’t shoot us.”

Not Yiddish – Polish, from Warsaw. She wasn’t surprised to see Paweł and the Russian, Mitya, emerge from the trees and lope toward her, their knapsacks bulging, Mitya carrying a treasure of mushrooms in his army cap in one hand and a short axe in the other.

Paweł reached her first, seized the end of her still-raised rifle and pushed it down, so it menaced only the frozen ground. “Are you still delirious? What are you doing?” he hissed at Chaye. 

“I thought I saw someone, there, by the oak tree.” 

She knew how feeble that sounded. Paweł had been opposed to women going on patrol, carrying firearms, participating in raids. Chaim had overruled him, and while Paweł would have held their fate in his hands in the city, in the forest Paweł was chiefly welcome because he’d snuck his wife and her parents out of the ghetto, and because the peasants hated talking to a Catholic city boy slightly less than they hated talking to the Jews who came armed in the night to barter and, sometimes, to steal milk or potatoes.

“You saw us,” Paweł said, not unkindly. “Stay in camp tomorrow, till your fever passes. Ask Rivka for more willow bark. You just wasted a bullet.”

The Russian spat on the ground. The forest behind the two men was still, like a child hiding its hands behind its back, mocking her.

They were a mixed group in their winter camp near a stream as clear as a maiden’s tear, the war’s flotsam and jetsam, all escapees of one kind or another. Chaye herself, Chaim and his arthritic wife, Rivka from Grodno and her three children, pregnant, silent Ada who’d walked into the forest from Białystok, Paweł’s wife and her father (they’d buried the mother under two intertwined pines last winter, marked the grave with pebbles which peasants looking for berries or mushrooms wouldn’t even notice), the Grabowski brothers who’d never been farther than Vilna yet talked of Jerusalem while their eyes shone like they were drunk or feverish – but there was also Paweł, little Jakub who didn’t know where he was from exactly, Mitya who’d drunk-slept through the German arrival then jumped off a train bearing his battalion to forced labor or a bullet to the back of the head somewhere in the Reich and once had threatened to cut Chaim’s _lying Jewish pig-throat_ over a game of cards. 

No one ever said the words _lucky escape_. They all knew better.

The men moved off, their boots rustling through the dead grass and the fallen leaves. The sky lowered over the three of them like a lid. Chaye’s gaze darted back to the oak tree, the patch of ground by its roots where the watching shadow had stood. Too tall to be a wolf, too slender for a bear, it had held too still for a human. Beyond the oak, between the aspens and the nude birches, the shadows thickened and roiled. Night came on quickly so late in the year.

Chaye shouldered her rifle, picked up the glove she’d dropped, and followed Paweł and Mitya away from the oak and the pond, back toward the stream and the camp.

Behind her, the interlaced shadows cast by the tall trees rippled and flowed like ink in water, one shadow among them appearing and flitting past in an eye-blink, much darker and better defined than the late hour on that cloud-strewn day should have allowed. Feathers rustled in the stillness. Somewhere, a dry branch cracked in the cold.


End file.
